Helping Counselors Succeed All Year Long

Another National School Counseling Week passed by in early February and, with it, our salute to the great work being done by counselors in schools across North America in helping students succeed.

But we all know that a one-week celebration isn’t enough. We need to keep at the important work of helping students gain personal insight, set goals, and make plans to reach them, all year long.

The American School Counselor Association (ASCA) is hard at work on these issues every single day. It is at the vanguard of this effort, working with the public sector agencies responsible for educating students and advocating for increased emphasis on counseling services to help students reach their goals.

ASCA Mindsets and Behaviors is a bottom-up approach to helping counselors and their students better understand how changing mindset and behavior leads to improved student success. The Mindsets and Behaviors model goes much deeper than standardized testing to address the real factors that affect students’ performance—in school and throughout their lives.

We have mapped our tools to ASCA Mindsets and Behaviors to help counselors more accurately identify each student’s likely mindset or behavior to leverage their strengths and, more importantly, help them help the student address unrecognized barriers to their scholastic and life success. You can download a copy of our map here.

This year, we celebrate our 20th year of partnering with school counselors in helping students chart their educational and career courses. Along the way, we’ve learned with our partners about what works, and what doesn’t, and how to adapt our tools to the needs counselors face in their classrooms and offices.

We’re happy to be partnering with them this year, and long into the future.